VMware Preps Software-Defined Data Center For Its Star Turn

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At VMworld this year, VMware is laying the foundation for what it hopes will be its next big thing: the software-defined data center.

In the software-defined data center, servers, storage and networking are virtualized and delivered as a service. VMware says pooling these resources together and automating them is the key to more efficient private, public and hybrid clouds.

The software-defined data center, or SDDC, is VMware's attempt to adopt a more Google-like infrastructure, in which apps can be provisioned faster and workloads can run in any type of cloud, Peter Wei, product marketing lead for VMware's cloud infrastructure business unit, said in an interview prior to VMworld.

VMware already owns the server virtualization market. Now it's trying to duplicate that success in storage and network virtualization, two segments that are still essentially up for grabs. If VMware pulls this off, it'll quiet critics who say the vendor's dominance of the data center is waning.

But the term "software-defined data center" still doesn't mean much to a large swath of VMware customers. Several VMware partners CRN reached out to before VMworld declined to comment on the SDDC strategy, claiming they needed more time to figure out what it means to them.

To help clarify the technology, VMware is flexing its marketing muscles, plastering San Francisco city bus stops with software-defined data center signage -- and probably confusing the vast majority of daily commuters.

Another potential roadblock to SDDC is that not all organizations have virtualized their servers yet. For these firms, the notion of running their IT operations virtually might seem like too much of a risk, one VMware partner told CRN.

"'Too many eggs in one basket' will be a common argument when we start abstracting the storage and networking away from dedicated physical boxes," said the partner, who asked not to be identified to avoid offending VMware. "There is also a huge stability worry that the SDDC will have to tackle -- one that storage and networking vendors have worked long and hard to squash."

At VMworld, VMware will looking to show that SDDC is a must-have technology. A big piece of this is vSAN, a new storage feature that combines technology VMware built in-house with technology from its February acquisition of storage startup Virsto.

VSAN pools together storage capacity from Flash and solid state drives and lets it function as a virtual storage area network. With software handling the heavy lifting, admins can set policies for how storage is allocated as easily as setting up a virtual machine, Wei said.